Photo Restoration – Slide to Digital
Here is a project that I did a few months ago for a family friend who wanted to be able to see his slides on his television screen.
There were over 1000 slides in total that he had taken in his travels around Europe with the earliest set taken from 1959.
All slides have been converted, cleaned and edited to its restored glory.
Click here to view a small selection of the restored photos.
The first task was to convert the slides to digital format, The simplest way would be to use a slide scanner but I had found some of them had low resolution and produces average results and the higher resolution scanners were more costly, I went with what was available and used a dSLR camera and a macro lens to capture the slides in all its details.
I created a makeshift lightbox by putting a video led light inside a box and placed a clear plastic sheet above.
After getting the camera equipment all setup, the first thing was to remove the plastic case and the 2 protective glass of each slide, this was a painstaking process but was required as the glass pieces had minute scratches and also when the 2 glass are pressed together it caused air bubbles.
The slide was then given a quick clean with an air blower and cloth and then placed onto the lightbox. Since the slide was so close to the macro lens; the camera found it difficult to focus and so it had to be manually (and meticulously) focused.
Once captured, it was put in to Adobe Lightroom where each slide was cropped and edited. Some of the slide had a slight red tint which caused purple skies in the image, this was easily fix by adjusting the temperature and tint in the white balance setting.
There were some vignetting that were visible from the original image, I used the Lens Correction setting to remove some of the dark corners.
I created a preset in Lightroom which helped speed up the editing process and then tweaked each slide individually.
After exporting the slides in Lightroom, the final processs was using the Spot Healing Brush Tool in Photoshop to remove the dust and dirt in the slides.
Dennis Cooper Photography – www.flickr.com/photos/denniscooper